Chennai students win award for humanoid robot

CHENNAI - : A group of students from Chennai won the best innovation award for a humanoid robot during the recently held Spring Innovations Competition at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

The students of Bharath University won the prestigious award by beating 66 other universities who had participated in the competition.

The robot is 58 centimeters long and weighs about 4.3 kilograms. The most important feature of the robot is that it can recognise faces apart from dancing, singing, walking and picking objects.

“It has the ability of thinking on his own, according to the situation. It’s called behaviour programme or behaviour-based control. For example, if I tell him to water a plant, even though the plant is dried, he will go, find the plant and check whether the plant is dried or not and he will pour the water, only if the plant is dry. If the plant is not dried he will not pour the water.” said Jai Shankar, Technical Advisor.

Cameras, motors and other mechanical devices have been used for the smooth movement of the robot.

“It can be used as a security robot, it can play football, it can dance, it can recognise the face, all the features have been combined together in a single form” said Venugopal, a team member, Bharath University.

The audience at the event enjoyed watching the robot dance to the tunes of A. R. Rahman’s Oscar award winning song ‘Jai Ho’ from the movie ‘Slumdog Millionaire’.

The creators also said that they want the military to make use of the robot.

The students said the robot’s creation makes it different from all the other robotic innovations because of the programmes that have been used for its functioning.

In recent years, robots have become a very common phenomenon due to new technologies.(ANI)